St Xavier’s is believed to be based on La Martiniere College, a renowned institution in Lucknow that still operates to this day. La Martiniere was the school of choice for the ruling elite in India. Established in 1845 as a first-class boys' college after the English public school model, La Martiniere is now open to all nationalities, as well as to girls.

Opium was widely available in India from the eighteenth century, when British traders began promoting poppy cultivation there in order to trade the drug in China.

Having won both the First Opium War (1839 to 1842) and the Second Opium War (1856 to 1860), compelling China to open its markets to opium, Britain benefited from the highly lucrative trade throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.